Volunteer Firefighting goes back a long way with me. I started at age fifteen as a member of my High School’s volunteer firefighting unit. Since then, I’ve been a volunteer firefighter in four different states. I know what it is to enter burning buildings to rescue unconscious people and to recover people too far gone to save. I know what it is to use a stream 2 1/2” line to cool a LNG tank adjacent to a burning building, knowing that in a BLEVE (when the pressure breaches the tank it blows up), I would not survive. I know the fear. But the things I did do not begin to hold a candle to the courage and dedication displayed by 9/11 first responders. Yet Republicans continue to block the legislation to provide care for the health effects of their heroism. The excuses are bold faced lies.
Pressure has been mounting on Republicans to relax their opposition to a bill to would provide health benefits to 9/11 first responders after Senate Republicans unanimously filibustered it earlier this month, but Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told Politico yesterday that he will likely block the measure yet again. Meanwhile, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said last night that the Senate must act immediately to complete the bill in order to allow enough time for the House to pass the same version before Congress recesses for Christmas. “[I]if you’re going to send us anything that we need to deal with, send it, frankly, by [Tuesday],” Hoyer told The Hill.
But appearing on Fox News this morning, Coburn defended his decision to obstruct the bill, saying he is upset with the process, and claiming that the bill was never considered by a congressional committee, and that there was never a hearing on it. Watch it:
Despite Coburn’s claim, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee did in fact hold a hearing on the bill in June — and Coburn should know as he sits on that committee… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Think Progress>
Democrats even changed funding source of the bill, so that it would no longer close the loophole to benefit foreign corporations, when they outsource American jobs, so Republicans no longer have that excuse. It comes down to pure greed and corruption. Every penny spent on deserving heroes is a penny Republicans can’t give to millionaires.
17 Responses to “Coburn Lies to Block First Responders Bill!”
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Coburn also held up funds allocated for Haiti Relief Aid. He is a pompous horse’s ass who doesn’t care about anyone!
Good catch, Jack. I should have thought of that.
Aw, give the doctor a break. It’s just that when he took the Hippocratic oath, he was too deaf to hear the “no” in “First, do no harm.”
Welcome Marcie! 🙂
I’m not too sure. He may have thought it was the Hypocrite Oath.
All I can say is AGENT ORANGE. How many decades did that take to be recognized as the cause of so many illnesses in, and birth defects in the children of veterans. Fuck Coburn and all politicians for their temerity and bullshit ways of trying to hide their true intent. YES all of them. No fight can ever be led from the center and on the right there is no center,
The more things change, my friend, the more they stay the same. The fight must be lead from the left.
I don’t understand why they even have to debate this – the 9/11 responders risked their own lives to save others and now they medical help for various illnesses that they acquired while working on the ‘pile’. This should be a no brainer. Allocate the money to help this desperately ill people and Fuck Coburn. 😡 😡 😡
The issue should be apolitical, Lisa, like unemployment benefit extension. But Republicans politicize every no-brainer that does not directly benefit millionaires or hate minorities.
I am a yellow dog democrat; but even if I was a repub I would be embarrassed by Coburn. It’s difficult being a dem in OK. I have lived here all my life; so it isn’t that bigotry and hypocricy are inherited; it’s just it’s unchristian to have other political beliefs than the “holy right”.
Welcome Phyllis! 🙂
If my memory serves, a “yellow dog” was a southern conservative racist who refused to vote Republican, because Lincoln freed the slaves. You don’t seem like that at all, and I thought all the yellow dogs had changed their ways and become the Republican base in keeping with the Southern strategy. Is there a new meaning for “yellow dog”? My sympathies over having that Senator!
They (republicans) won’t appropriate a few billion dollars to help 9/11 first responders, but readily appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out financial executives who nearly caused a world wide economic meltdown.
It is easy to tell whose interests they hold close to their hearts, and whose interests they don’t give a shit about.
Bingo, Jerry!
please remember that the Bush/Cheney Crime Family pressured the EPA/Christie Whitman to declare that there were NO HEALTH RISKS at the 911 site, and that safety masks were NOT ALLOWED and NOT NECESSARY.
Christie Whitman later testified that there WERE hazardous materials in the air.
This just STINKS!
And yet Ross Douthat just wrote a column praising the scumbag Coburn in the Times…
Sarastro, that’s an excellent point. I was a firefighter long enough to be condident that the NYFD knew she was lying. They went anyway.
It’s not any different from Republicans who are always eager to send our youth to war and then refuse to support the veterans when they return. I guess conservatives think “duty” includes the duty to get sick and die.
Or that the duty is to die before Republicans have to pay for the results of their service.